You Won't Believe How Much of Your Life You Spend Deciding What to Wear

You're standing in front of your closet, scanning the neat lines of your color-coded, Kondo-approved, joy-inducing wardrobe. It is Schrödinger's bureau: There are dozens of outfits; there are no outfits at all. No matter how many closet clean-outs you go through, the problem never seems to go away. We know. We go through exactly the same thing every morning. We'll have to take our comfort in solidarity, though, because the numbers, well, the numbers are just depressing.

Those numbers are 17, 4, and 6. Specifically, each day the average woman spends 17 minutes picking out what to wear. That comes out to four full days every year, or six solid months between high-school graduation and retirement of doing absolutely nothing but choosing a damn shirt. The stats come from a poll by Marks & Spencer, a major U.K. retailer, so we're not exactly talking about highly scientific study parameters here. Big grain of salt aside, the idea that you might spend half of your yearly vacation days trying to match the exact shade of black in your favorite dress pants with an equally black top is a sobering thought.

If it makes you feel better, the boys aren't much better off (no surprise to anyone who's ever lived with a guy.) While the men in the poll reported spending slightly less time on their morning wardrobe debate, it's not nearly as dramatic a difference as mediocre stand-up comedians would lead you to believe. In fact, guys spent 13 minutes a day on their outfit selection, just four minutes shy of the ladies' totals. And while a whopping 62 percent of women succumbed to what the poll calls "wardrobe rage," more than a third of men have also fallen prey to the "I have nothing to wear and everything's terrible" blues. Consider that the bright spot of this whole sad affair: Next time a guy in your life teases you about staring into the abyss of your closet, you can at least rest assured that he's as screwed as you are. Hooray?